The Dark Knight Joker Origin: Acid Shank
by MalkeyTone
Summary: The Joker's life before Batman was horrifying. He goads a man into shanking him with an acid-tipped knife in a prison cell. The traumatizes a cop trying to help him with his life story about his childhood, his drug-addled brain, his brain-damaged mother, his life living on the streets. A story of madness I dare you to read without puking in fear.


CHAPTER 1: Acid Shank

"HAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD, ARE YOU SERIOUS?"

"Why didn't you just cut to the chase and cover yourself in dead babies?"

A man, thin, sitting with his hands together inside a brutally bare granite holding cell in the jail of a police precinct, talking at his temporary cellmate Dale.

Dale: "What the fuck did you just say?"

"I'll spell it out for you, criminal mastermind. You're telling me you tried to jack a car in the richest part of town. Gated community, green hedges, guards all over rich neighbourhood. Now you're complaining about 'ohhhh, these fucking pig cops kicked the shit out of me, fuck them, they threw me in here, how dare they'.

"You tried to steal a car in the neighbourhood where the big dogs who run Gotham City live, and you don't expect to get bit? YOU WERE ASKING FOR IT, YOU HILARIOUS RETARD. You were begging, PLEADING sweetly with a kick me sign on your back for a cop to come in and slap you around some. You're lucky those rich folk didn't just shoot you in the street and call animal control to pick up your corpse, never mind landing in a jail cell with me."

"So if you were going to do something THAT STUPID that's OBVIOUSLY going to land you in jail instantly, why not cut to the chase?

"Why didn't you just...cover yourself in a flesh suit of freshly dead babies, walk into a police precinct with your infant blood covered hands up, shout "FUCK THE POLICE!", punch a police horse in the face, then surrender? At least then you'd saving yourself and the cops some time so they can get the crippling beating over with, fast-track you to the isolated protected idiot section of Blackgate Prison, where morons are kept separate from the rest of the prisoners in case they accidentally kill themselves with a spork at lunch time."

"Hm? So why didn't you? Hellooo?"

Dale stares at the other man with shocked disbelief, at the sheer over the top scale of this disrespect.

Dale pulls a hidden knife out of the bottom of his shoe, the blade glinting a dull dripping green in the light, stabs as it at the other man's stomach and TWISTS it clockwise as he digs in.

The man catches Dale's hand right as it pierces muscle.

Steam rises from his guts as the acid on the knife burns him. He grits his teeth and lets out a thin scream through closed teeth as the pain laces through him.

The man headbutts his cellmate in the face, breaking his nose, and wrenches the knife out of his hand.

Dale falls backwards, staggering.

The man shakes his head from side to side, panting like a dog, relishing the pain.

"Wooooo boy, that was good-how did you do that? You added this little lemon twist at the end, nice little personal touch...so little artistry to appreciate these days among criminals."

The man stabs Dale in the gut, smiling as he does it, the force of the stab raising Dale up into the air by his toes a little. And TWISTS, HARD, sloooowly, methodically, with care and jagged delay to add little micro-slices of pain to season the stab with. Blood drips out of Dale's mouth.

"See, THAAAAT'S how you do it. Twist AFTER you get deep into the guts, makes the twisting of the blade more effective that way. You'd tell me if I was getting the technique wrong, cuz we're pals right, I'm sure. Such a weird feeling, what was that, battery acid? You have to tell me your chemical recipe sometime. Am I doing it right?"

Dale chokes on his own blood, spilling blood in the other man's eyes.

He doesn't blink for a moment, as his eyes slowly reddens with his victim's blood.

He shouts.

"AM

I

DOING

IT

RIGHT?"

Dale screams through the pool of blood in his mouth

"YeSHHHKK"

The cell opens and a male cop rushes in, nightstick swinging at the other man and smashing right into the side of his jaw.

Cop: "WHAT THE FUCK YOU PSYCHO PIECE OF-"

The young man who will one day become the Joker puts his blood-stained hands up, surrendering peacefully, knocked to the ground by the force of the cop's blow.

Smiling.

The cop brings his night stick up

Then down hard.

Trying to beat sanity into this man and failing.

Night stick up

Then down again.

Up

and then-

A female cop rushes in.

Grabs the night stick before it comes down to finally crack open his skull.

This is the last thing he sees before he blacks out: a cop, saving him from another cop. He never thought he'd see the day.

It's funny. He laughs one little wet chuckle as the bruises on his cheeks barely let the laugh out of his swollen lips.

He passes out with a smile on his face.

Suddenly, he wakes up. Stinging numb pain woke him.

He's in an office. Her office, the female cop's. She's applying ice to his face bruised and torn face. Her words come in strangely, like they're underwater.

Her:

"doEs fLL cnsss"

"What?"

Her: "Does it feel like a concussion?"

"It feels like..."

Her: "Yeah?"

"It feels like the Gotham City Police Force forgot how to beat up suspects correctly. The victim shouldn't be able to talk afterwards. Can't snitch on the cop for being naughty afterward, see? Standards have dropped. You all should be ashamed of yourselves."

She pauses, confused and unable to believe he's still talking smack to a police officer after what her partner just did to his face.

He holds the ice to his own face, and she walks around her desk to sit down and face him.

Her: "We're not all like him. I apologize for what you went through."

"Hnnhehe."

Her: "What?"

"You're weird. It's funny. What's your name, Good Cop?"

Her: "My name is Detective Josie Macdonald. And yours?"

"Usually I'd make something up, Josie, but I'm running a little low on charm right now."

He shuffles his body weight around a little, uncomfortable. He sighs.

"Don't have one."

Josie: "What, you don't have a NAME?"

He shrugs, then winces in pain, regretting the shrug. Through the paine smiles weakly and genuinely at Josie, in a 'what can ya do, am I right' expression.

Josie: "That's...no. Wait."

Josie:"That can't...you're lying."

Josie: "How...that's impossible. You're, what, 23? 25? 19? It's hard to tell with you street people."

His eyes closed, he shrugs with his face, trying to stay as still as possible to avoid setting off his injury pain.

Josie: "You don't know how old you are. You don't know your name...Wow. I was right."

He raises an eyebrow.

Josie: "I checked in the records for your fingerprints, anyone with your really specific description-nothing."

Josie: "Every hood in Gotham's usually commits their first crime as a juvenile and has their name and prints in the system from then on. And you're not in the system? At ALL? With the way you hurt that guy without worrying about the consequences? No way."

Josie: "So I looked at you, your clothes, your hair, your weather-beaten skin, how sickly you look, how you almost killed that guy instantly...and I told myself a little story. You know, I'm a detective, that's all we do-look at the evidence, tell yourselves a little story around those pieces of evidence."

"You're being awfully friendly with me, DETECTIVE...awfully friendly to the psycho, who just carved his cellmate up inside your precinct."

Josie: "The other guy was delirious, and almost dead of blood loss when we pulled him out of there, but he was ranting nonstop. He said himself, he attacked you first. I don't know who you are, or what you've done, but creepy laugh or not, this time, it was self-defense."

His smile dies. He stares at her in a dead, blank way. He's surprised she figured that out.

He's surprised that she gives a shit, and he doesn't like being charecterized as some virginal victim.

"He was stuck in a room with me for 5 hours, and I was talking."

With pride, he says

"No one keeps their self control or their morals in a room with me talking. Y

Josie: "I told myself a story. Of a kid, left abandoned on the streets before he can even remember. No parents, no one, left on the hard streets to fend for himself. Never been to school, never been input into the foster care system, never had someone to look after him. Living wild, roaming the dark forgotten slum streets of the city where the cops don't care. Stealing what he can, living in the cold and the rain. Sick all the time. Hungry. Beaten up by the older homeless people for what little food he has every other day."

Josie: "A life of crime just to survive. Never caught, never went to jail, never been to prison."

He smirks ironically, quietly raging inside.

Josie: "How right am I?"

He says nothing, face studiously blank. A practiced face.

Josie looks at him with concern and sympathy slowly softening it.

Josie: "The psychiatrists would have a field day with you. A child born into crime who knew nothing else, living inside the city streets, but never inside a society."

She tries to reach for his hand across the desk. But an angry, sadistic, challenging glint in his eye makes her hesitate.

Josie: "I can't even imagine the things you've seen. The things you've done. The things that've been done TO you. I just...I'm just saying. If you need help coming infor once, I'm here, y'know.

He's bored now. The woe is you, look at the poor orphan pity-parade isn't new. He leans back, settling in deep, relaxing his muscles, knowing a whole train of bullshit is about to come out of her mouth. Of someone pretending they understand you.

Josie: "Ok, ok. Too much, too fast. Well...you need a name, at least."

"I just pick a different name every time I meet a new person. Whatever."

Josie: "Everyone needs a name of their own. How about Jack?"

Jack: "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Josie: "Jack it is, then. Look, man, I know...I dunno. That there's not much that I can say to convince you to get off the streets, live somewhere decent, get a job, get some ID cards with a name and social security number"

He snorts in disgust.

Josie: "But I think you're forgetting something. Something you've probably spent your whole life wondering. I can help you find answers, IF you agree to come out of the cold. Let us help you."

Jack: "Oh? And what's that, Good Cop?"

Josie: "Who are your parents? Where are they? Why did this all happen?"

A sudden, shrill, high pitched, sincere, hi-larious, deeply amused

LAUGH.

Jack: "HaHAAAAAAAAA. Ohhhh DAMN! Woooohahaha. Oh, I...I needed that. Thanks for that one, Jose, you're a peach. Oof..."

She's not amused.

Josie: "You can hide behind fake contempt and ego and put up a front to hide your pain all you want, but deep down inside"

He SMASHES his hand on the table, staring her right in the eyes.

His voice goes dark.

Jack: "Oh you..."

"You think you'll just pluck at my heart strings...wrap me around your finger by promising the poor broken boy to find his widdle mommy and daddy...use that as a...what...a bargaining chip? To convince me to join you...CIVILIZED people."

"Let me tell YOU a little story about my parents, so you can end your annoying. little. charity case crusade."

"As a kid, I did wonder where my parents were. Not like a crying little sissy or anything—just that, hey, every other kid has parents, where'd they go? I would've wondered the same thing if I had a missing, bleeding stump of a toe—what happened to it? Where did it get lost? Eventually, I tried to remember. Tried hard."

"I remember small flashes. A rotting dumpster. An alleyway. Being fed little slips of white paper. Jagged graffiti on steel store covers. A bar sign. Maybe this is where I was left behind, so I went looking."

"After a few months of walking, I found the street. It was worse off than it was before, abandoned buildings, burnt-out cars left in the street, bar still there where the withered old junkies and the—the crazy people drank. I hit a dead end."

"So I hung around that neighborhood for a few weeks. Why not? Same as any other place I stayed in. The one freedom I always had, no matter how bad things got—to sleep and go wherever I want."

" Slept next to the dumpster in the back alley the whole time.

" Maybe I was born in it."

Josie covers her eyes with her hands.

"Anyways. Eventually I woke up to the stinging feeling of quarters being thrown in my face. Opened my eyes, it was some oh-so-funny citizen giving money to the homeless while getting his cheap thrills at the same time. So I went into the bar for a drink."

"Picked my poison, had it poured in a glass for me. A lot of the old regulars at the counter. This fat woman was shouting—HOLLERING, really, couldn't talk at a normal volume, fatter than my bruised lip right now, taking up half the bar counter, rambling on in a schizophrenic nonsense rattle. About the dead rainbows, the sky in her eyes, the rot in her panties. Really irritating."

"But then she started to make sense."

"She talked about how there used to be that insane asylum right down the road, and she lived there for years. That insane asylum closing down's the reason there's a lot of—of crazy people running around Gotham's streets. She said there used to be these patients, these guys in there, scary guys, real insane, drooling and attacking the orderlies, thepatients. Half of them were in and out of the isolation rubber rooms for starting fights, throwing handfuls of their fresh shit on the staff. They teased her for her weight, called her an insane whale, taking up the whole damn hallway when a man was just trying to get to his room."

"Eventually, they started saying to her that she…looked big enough to take them all on. She didn't know what that meant, she had the mind of a child then."

"One day she took the wrong corner down a hallway, and they were all waiting for her. They held her down, did her. Filled EVERY hole, she said."

" As she's telling this story, the bar staff and regulars are just saying nothing with frozen expressions, but one of them interrupts, incredulous, 'well, not EVERY hole obviously'.

" 'EVERY hole' , she said, her three chins wobbling, her lip quivering."

"It was at this point, listening to her in the bar, not moving, not breathing, I started to recognize her voice, from somewhere deep inside me."

"So, afterwards, she said she wasn't sure which of them got her pregnant. Before that all the staff had treated her pretty nice, like an oversized kid who needed toys and snacks and taking care of. But after…what happened…they treated her different. The bigger her belly got, the more bothered they seemed to get, the more angrily they snapped at her. She didn't understand what was happening, why everyone was so MAD at her all of a sudden. She cried and asked and asked, but nobody gave her an answer. Eventually it got to the point they weren't allowed to keep a pregnant woman in a psychiatric hospital that close to birth. But by that point, the staff couldn't stand to look at her anymore."

"They let her out into the street, didn't even process her paperwork or anything, didn't give her her ID back. Just kicked her out like so much unwanted garbage, as quickly as possible."

"She didn't know where to go, what to do, and her belly was so big, walking was so hard. She was in so much pain all the time, puking up every morning. Eventually, she found the warmest spot she could—a dumpster behind this bar, and gave birth right then and there."

"After he stopped crying and she stopped him from eating the surrounding garbage, she was glad to have a playmate to keep her company. She got more food and money from strangers too when they saw her walking around with the baby, so that was nice. But he was so HUNGRY all the time, so she had to make money."

"She eventually ended up making money letting men do to her what they did to her at the asylum."

"At that point, I remembered her voice completely. From deep inside of me. Faintly, through a haze of rotting rainbows and distorted vision, I remembered. Being so, so young, probably a baby, and my reaction to hearing her voice back then. It doesn't seem possible, but…I remember…hating her. Not just hate, but…CONTEMPT. Looking at her dumb, slack-mouthed face staring at me so happy and so stupid, and feeling deep contempt for her. Because—and I know this sounds like a lie—even then, before I knew words, I knew she was stupider than me."

"Anyways, she was wrapping up her story. She said here and there, she started to make a little bit of extra money to have fun. She preferred taking LSD, acid, on little white slips of paper. She said it made the voices and scary pictures in her head into happy pictures and sunshine and sparkles. She wanted to play with the baby, you know, share things with it, make it happy, and stop him CRYING all the time, god, so much crying, such a hassle, she didn't know how to make him happy and stop CRYING. So she started taking acid with her baby."

"Mother-son bonding time, yknow?"

"She said that after a while of feeding acid to her baby, he started getting real quiet. Real quiet. Getting' all loopy and funny and wandering around the alley woozily like a drunk."

" Eventually, he stopped crying, and started laughing."

"All the time."

Josie, listening, suppresses a small, subtle gag reflex in her throat and pushes it down.

"So she was a happy mama. Her boy was all laughter and mischief and wandering off, no more crying, no more sadness. That meant she was doing a good job, right?"

His head down, eyes wistful and nostalgic, he laughs a quiet, small laugh under his breath, amusement at the poor stupid woman's simple child logic conclusion.

"heh."

"Eventually it got boring and tiring, though. He became less of her playmate and more a burden, she said. Carrying him around in her arms all the time was such a pain, and her boobs really hurt from all the breastfeeding. She had to keep stopping him from playing with the roadkill dead animals in the alleys, which was kinda weird. It stopped being fun."

"She left him in the alley, and she wondered where he was. She came back here sort of randomly, wondering where he was now, looking at where he was born."

"With a small cough, the barstaff and the regulars switched topics and moved on to talking about other stuff. The whale sat on her stool and sipped her drink through a straw, satisfied and pleased with herself for getting to the end of her story."

"At this point, I'd made a decision some time into her story, and gripped the cold knife in my jacket pocket hard and didn't let go."

"It just felt inevitable. Like I didn't have a choice. This was always how it was going to go happen. Like it was as natural as anything, like breathing or sleeping or eating or shitting. It was just…how things happened. Part of some cycle you couldn't opt out of."

"Near the end of the night, she tottered off drunk off her tits into the dark street. I followed."

"She didn't see me."

Josie isn't breathing.

"I gripped the cold blade of my knife between my fist in my jacket pocket. It was comforting."

"She walked along random alleyways, swaying side to side, holding on to walls, singing a melody of a song through her garbled throat."

"I stalked her, waiting for the perfect moment, tracking her movements. Trying to make it land perfect, when she was least aware, when she closed her eyes the longest."

"I was about to surge forward and DO IT but then something happened."

"My mind…I…I could see myself through her eyes. I could imagine myself as her, seeing through her eyes further down the alley, unsteady from side to side, happy. I couldn't get my mind out of her weird kid point of view, in her slurried child mind, her walking blissfully unaware of the man with the knife a few steps behind her."

"I was seeing through her eyes, and mine from where I was standing, at the same time. Victim and hunter at the same time."

"It was…

"disturbing."

"I stood there shocked, couldn't think, couldn't move.

She drifted off into the road.

I never saw her again."

He sits in his seat, tired, bleak, faintly bored. Spent from telling the long tale.

Josie breathes out a long-held breath, finally, eyes seeing nothing, not even mentally in the room right now. In shock.

A long, long silence, filled with the thick stench of two people knowing each other completely, and shuddering away, disgusted.

Jack: "So, Detective."

Jack: "Right now, you know what's going through my mind? Not where my momma is, or which of those vile men was my daddy, not some deep down bullshit maternal love stopping me from slicing her up like a stuck pig in that alley from neck to groin."

Jack: "All I've been thinking about for the past few minutes is if I beat you to death right here on your desk, stole your police uniform, put it on, and wandered around this police precinct with your blood on your uniform, with the nametag "Det. Josie Maconald" on, how long would it take before your colleagues would notice I'm not you? That I wasn't supposed to be here? That I'm wearing a nametag with a WOMAN'S name on it in a woman's uniform? Or would they just blink and ignore me, assuming I'm just another cop who had to rough someone up and do what I had to do."

"Would I get away with it?"

She tenses up slightly, but only just. Still in shock.

He eases up a little bit, relaxing, getting chummy. He raises his hands and shoulders up in a 'whataayya gonna do, amirite' gesture.

"Still want to take me in from the cold and reform me, Detective?"

Dazed and speechless, without even processing the paperwork, she let him out onto the street.

They didn't meet again for many, many years later in a different precinct, him with white skin and green hair, killing one of her colleagues in an interrogation room with his handcuffs.

She didn't recognize him.

-TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2 OF AN ONGOING SERIES-

 **A Foreword by the Author**

I was looking to do the impossible.

As a writer, to me, the most impossible task seemed to me to write a satisfying, dark, and definitive Joker origin story. I love the Killing Joke the same as everybody else, it's a good story but a bad Joker origin. It's like trying to write an origin story for Satan if he never had an origin story-too much cultural weight and hype behind the character for any origin to really do it justice.

In case you can't tell, this is an introduction, not the story. Feel free to read the story itself, it's pretty incredible.

I then decided to make my task even more impossible, and do what I really REALLY wanted to do that was impossible:

Do a dark gritty blood-soaked origin story for Joker from THE DARK KNIGHT, as played by Heath Ledger. I know everybody's obsessed with Heath Ledger's Joker performance, but I'm really, REALLY obsessed with it. I've been obsessed with him since I was a kid, and I'm 22 now. I've watched those scenes of Batman and Joker in that dingy interrogation room probably hundreds of times now, and it never gets old.

The thing I especially love about Heath Ledger's Joker is the layers. You can infer so much about his life from the way he looks, his fucked up makeup, his unwashed hair, his clothes, his beliefs, the way he kills people and talks them into their own doom. He's clearly lived homeless on the streets at some point. Here's a man who says, sincerely, "I'll show you. When the chips are down, these... these civilized people-they'll EAT each other.

See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve."

This is clearly a belief system born of having seen and lived a life of having seen people do acts too awful to describe. EAT each other? What has this guy BEEN through? To a guy who's had such a density of horrifying life experience, of course the lie of civilization seems like such weak bullshit, the stupidest con of all, a really bad joke in poor taste. Of course he just sees his evil acts as beating other people to the punch before they do the same thing to him. He's probably seen the worst of the worst do atrocities every day of his life, acts that would make war criminals shudder. Most of what we see of Gotham's crime-ridden streets is very organized, mafiosos and supervillains. But the forgotten corners, the abandoned houses of the worst city in the world? Who knows what happens down there.

You see the GCPD police say his fingerprints aren't in the system, no name, no other aliases, no records, and yet he seems to have a lot of criminal experience under his belt. Watch him rob that bank and turn his crew against each other so only he gets the money—this is a man who has robbed so many places with other crews, seen those crews rip each other off and self-destruct like idiots, then decided to take advantage of that dynamic for once. Yet he's never been caught? Never been given a name, never gone to school,never entered into the system, never gone to prison for killing someone in some horrific way? Impossible.

That can only be because he was born and grew up _outside the system. Outside society itself._

You look at this guy, and his makeup, hear his creepy voice, and his casual maiming of people, his obsession with corrupting people till they show their true selves, his beliefs, and how fucking disturbing every inch of him is.

Everything about him screams that his origin story, his LIFE, was so awful, so viscerally disturbing, so unimaginable, if he told you the story, you would immediately start puking and go insane.

That was the point of this story. To tell that unimaginable horrifying story. To do the impossible. To fill in the gaps I've pieced together since I was a kid, about one of the greatest villains and greatest performances of all time.

I understand this origin may seem strangely disconnected from the Joker's criminal history or kills. However, this is intended to be an ongoing series, and it was important to address and move on from basic questions such as who his parents are, how he grew up, where he lived, and a hint at where his psychiatric problems may have started, before jumping into his criminal history.

So yeah. Watch me attempt the impossible and pull it off, or crash brilliantly into a flaming heap.

Enjoy.


End file.
